Under cover of darkness, thieves dove into the inky waters of Tennessee’s river sanctuaries and scooped up endangered washboard mussels by the thousands. The thick shells of these animals—some as big as Frisbees—

were destined to be cut into cubes, polished round, and implanted in saltwater oysters to grow cultured pearls. “Every one of them was almost a twenty-dollar bill,” says David Sims, then a game warden with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency who was charged with surveying these bivalves. Poachers could wipe out an entire bed of mussels in a single night.

Today, 25 years later, Sims can rattle off the common names of freshwater mussel species like a lineup of Seussian characters: Appalachian monkeyfaces, white wartybacks, Tennessee heelsplitters, fat pocketbooks, shiny pigtoes, pistolgrips, and spectaclecases. The orange-footed pimpleback conceals in its bumpy case a fleshy appendage the color of Orange Crush soda. “They’re hard to find,” Sims says, lifting a glistening mussel from a gurgli

ng tank. “We hold on to them, once we’ve got them.” He cradles the creature like a rare jewel as the mussel pulls the two halves of its shell closed and an elegant arc of water shoots out.

North America hosts the richest variety of freshwater mussels in the world, and the epicenter for this biodiversity is in the southeastern United States. In surveys, biologists have found more species in a few square meters of the Tennessee River than are found in all of Europe. The smallest mussel species can fit on a pinky fingernail when fully grown; the largest have the diameter of a dinner plate. Their shells grow rings over time, like trees, and some can live to be more than a hundred years old.

Mussels are critical, if unsung, players in river systems. They spend their lives half-buried in sediment, stabilizing riverbeds and preventing erosion. There they serve as food for birds, muskrats, and otters; and when they die, their shells are adopted as secondhand homes by crayfish and aquatic insects. Most importantly, mussels filter river water—up to 20 gallons per mussel per day by some estimates. They live off the algae and plankton gleaned from this filter feeding, and in the process remove silt and toxic substances from the water, including some heavy metals, harmful bacteria, pharmaceuticals, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as PCBs. “They’re like little miniature treatment plants,” says stream ecologist Jesse DiMartini, of the DuPage County Forest Preserve District in Illinois.

In more than 20 years as a meteorologist, Joshua Wurman had seen – and chased – more than 150 tornadoes. But the one that hit his pickup truck caught him by surprise.

On a warm spring evening in 2012, Wurman was driving down a two-lane highway in the small plains town of Russell, Kansas. In Russell, as in hundreds of other communities across the central and eastern US, late spring is tornado season, and Wurman – who became something of a TV celebrity in 2008 after a string of appearances on the Discovery Channel show Storm Chasers – knew that their chances of seeing a twister were good. Earlier in the day, radar had shown a giant storm brewing over central Kansas. When he and his team hit the road, their aim was to collect real-time data on the wind and weather using mobile radar units that can scan and image the structure of storms. Wurman had been trying to put instruments in the twister’s path. About a mile away, collaborator and atmospheric scientist Karen Kosiba was directing the mission from one of those mobile units.

The tornado chaser’s gamble is to get close enough for good data, but not close enough to endanger your life. That night in Russell, Wurman – a father of four – came close to losing the bet.

With round lenses set in super-thick frames, these new eyeglasses look like they belong on a cartoon character. But what they lack in style, they make up for in smart design. Their lenses are made of glycerin — a thick, colorless liquid — encased in clear rubber. And without effort, they will focus on whatever the wearer looks at.

Nazmul Hasan is the first to admit that the glasses he helped design may not be comfortable — or look cool. “They’re not very fashionable,” he concedes. “And they’re heavy,” notes this graduate student in engineering at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Still, these glasses are truly special. The lenses in normal glasses curve in a specific way to help a person’s eyes focus on something close or far away. Not everyone who needs glasses requires the same curvature. So one person’s glasses will not necessarily work for someone else. In contrast, the glasses that Hasan and his team designed can be adjusted to meet anyone’s visual needs.

]]>How Bose–Einstein condensates keep revealing weird physicshttp://stephenornes.com/?p=1020
Fri, 16 Jun 2017 21:13:08 +0000http://stephenornes.com/?p=1020A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), the first of which was shown experimentally 22 years ago, isn’t your garden variety state of matter. It formed at a fraction above absolute zero and only in atoms that act like bosons, one of two types of fundamental particles. Bosons don’t follow the Pauli exclusion principle, which prohibits two particles from existing in the same quantum state. When bosonic atoms are cooled to form a condensate, they can lose their individuality. They behave like one big collective superatom, analogous to how photons become indistinguishable in a laser beam. But it’s even weirder than that.

“In a very good analogy, one can view a BEC as a bell, which begins to ring spontaneously when it is cooled below a certain temperature,” writes physicist Nick Proukakis at the Joint Quantum Centre Durham–Newcastle in the United Kingdom, in Universal Themes of Bose–Einstein Condensation, a forthcoming collection of research essays on progress in BECs. That behavior provides physicists with an extraordinary opportunity: to study bizarre quantum effects on a large scale, instead of having to probe individual particles.

For the last two decades, physicists have treated BECs something like Play-Doh. They poke it, smash it, tickle it with lasers, and trap it in magnetic fields. They mix condensates together to see what happens, and use it to slow down light. They have observed strange behaviors that would have been impossible to predict even two decades ago: solids that flow through themselves, for example.

]]>Seeking a Second Opinionhttp://stephenornes.com/?p=1017
Fri, 16 Jun 2017 21:11:23 +0000http://stephenornes.com/?p=1017In November 2012, when she was 52 years old, Shannon Semple was diagnosed with a disease she didn’t have. She credits getting a second opinion with saving her life.

Semple, a physician assistant at a regional hospital in New Bern, North Carolina, had developed a persistent fever and high blood pressure. She spent a few days as a patient in the same hospital where she works, but her condition puzzled her doctors. They ultimately diagnosed her with a tick-borne illness. Antibiotics helped at first, but her symptoms returned.

]]>How nonequilibrium thermodynamics speaks to the mystery of lifehttp://stephenornes.com/?p=1008
Mon, 13 Feb 2017 20:46:07 +0000http://stephenornes.com/?p=1008In his 1944 book What is Life?, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that organisms stay alive precisely by staving off equilibrium. “How does the living organism avoid decay?” he asks. “The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism.”

However, the second law of thermodynamics, and the tendency for an isolated system to increase in entropy, or disorder, comes into play. Schrödinger wrote that the very act of living is the perpetual effort to stave off disorder for as long as we can manage; his examples show how living things do that at the macroscopic level by taking in free energy from the environment. For example, people release heat into their surroundings but avoid running out of energy by consuming food. The ultimate source of “negative entropy” on Earth, wrote Schrödinger, is the Sun.

Recent studies suggest something similar is happening at the microscopic level as well, as many cellular processes—ranging from gene transcription to intracellular transport—have underlying nonequilibrium drivers.

Indeed, physicists have found that nonequilibrium systems surround us. “Most of the world around us is in this situation,” says theoretical physicist Michael Cross at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena. Cross is among many theorists who spent decades chasing a general theory of nonequilibrium systems, and he says interesting things happen when systems remain out of equilibrium. “One of the biggest surprises is that driving a system far from equilibrium doesn’t just lead to turbulence. It leads to structure, and the most fascinating one is life.”

]]>Solving a math problem to create arthttp://stephenornes.com/?p=1005
Mon, 13 Feb 2017 20:43:29 +0000http://stephenornes.com/?p=1005Optimization is the mathematical quest for the best way to do something, from finding the shortest distance between two places to figuring out the best way to pack a suitcase. It often involves calculating the highest or lowest value of something. The applications are far-reaching. To Bosch, they also offered a pleasing aesthetic. “I wanted to convince my students that this material I teach is beautiful and incredibly applicable,” says Bosch, who teaches at Oberlin College in Ohio. “My mission was to show them that pretty much any field you could think of has optimization applications.”

So Bosch went looking for examples in areas that seem as far from mathematics as one can get. He settled on visual art. There may not be any obvious overlap between the two pursuits, but Bosch figured that if he could show his students how optimization methods could produce art, then maybe he could convince them the field is applicable almost anywhere. “It became an obsession,” he says.

And it paid off: Bosch is now known among mathematicians—and the math–art subset of that community—for his line drawings, mosaics, and sculptures created using solutions to optimization problems. He’s also organized showings of mathematical art at galleries and conferences, and has given lectures to audiences ranging from elementary school children to the mathematically curious at the Museum of Math in New York.

Read more about the art of Robert Bosch in PNAS, here.

Image: Robert Bosch

]]>The Internet of Things wants to link all facets of our worldhttp://stephenornes.com/?p=1002
Mon, 13 Feb 2017 20:41:46 +0000http://stephenornes.com/?p=1002A 94Fifty looks like an ordinary basketball. You can inflate, dribble, pass, shoot, swoosh and slam-dunk it. But there’s more going on than meets the fingers.

During play, the ball records how hard and fast a person dribbles and throws. It also measures the arc of a shot. It sends the data to a user’s smartphone. This phone then uses an app to analyze a player’s game. Then the app offers tips for better ball handling or for improving three-point shots.

Will this ball help a driveway hotshot become the next LeBron James? It’s too soon to tell. But many experts think it may well be part of a revolution in technology.

The 94Fifty is a “smart” basketball. It gets its name from the dimensions of an NBA court: 94 feet by 50 feet (28.7 by 15 meters). The ball “observes” the world around it. It then can use these data to calculate things and provide useful information to help a player get better. It’s part of the Internet of Things.

The Internet of Things is the idea that ordinary objects can be turned into “smart” objects that measure and interact with their environments. A smart refrigerator keeps track of what’s inside. A smart lightbulb turns itself off when not in use. A smart toilet flushes itself and texts a user if it springs a leak or is about to overflow. These devices might communicate with users through their smartphones or home computer networks.

]]>When your stuff spies on youhttp://stephenornes.com/?p=999
Mon, 13 Feb 2017 20:40:26 +0000http://stephenornes.com/?p=999In October 2016, hackers hit a company called Dyn. Hackers are people who write computer programs that can break into other computer programs. And here, their target was an important one. Dyn makes sure the right website pops up when you type in a web address. After the hack, people around the world had trouble getting to many websites, including Amazon, Netflix and Twitter.

In the aftermath of the attack, security experts reported finding that flaws in the Internet of Things had made the problem worse. The Internet of Things is the collection of everyday objects that can gather information then share it online. These objects use built-in sensors and other small devices to interact with the environment around them.

For example, “smart” basketballs or soccer balls can collect data on shooting skills to help a player improve. Smart dolls can recognize their owners and have friendly conversations. Smart cars can monitor the road for signs of danger. Even an ordinary house can become a smart home. A heater might shut itself off when it senses that the house is empty, for example. Or a lamp might turn itself off after a child falls asleep.

Read more about your insecure devices at Science News for Students, here.

]]>The return of supersolids!http://stephenornes.com/?p=995
Mon, 13 Feb 2017 20:38:40 +0000http://stephenornes.com/?p=995We learn it from a young age: solids hold their shapes; liquids flow. Physical states of matter are mutually exclusive. A solid occupies a particular position in space, its molecules fixed. A fluid assumes the shape of its container, its molecules in constant motion. But a so-called supersolid, a predicted phase of matter that forms only under extreme circumstances, doesn’t follow this idea of order. To describe supersolids is an exercise in contradictions. On the one hand, they form rigid crystalline structures. On the other, theory predicts that part of their mass also acts like a superfluid – a quantum phase of matter that flows like a liquid, but without viscosity. That combination lets supersolids do things that seem unfathomable to the humdrum, room-temperature, Newtonian world, like flow through themselves – without friction.

Although the Russian physicists Alexander Andreev and Ilya Liftshitz first predicted in 1969 that supersolids could form in helium close to absolute zero, definite proof has been hard to come by, and this elusive phase of matter has largely remained entrenched in the world of theory. That may have changed, though: two independent groups of researchers – one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, and the other at ETH Zurich in Switzerland – recently reported forming supersolids

Read more about the weirdness of supersolids here, in an article from Physics World.